LUCKY JIM AND THE FIFTIES

Lucky Jim piloted Amis from relative obscurity to nationwide fame. It went through ten impressions in 1954 and has never gone out of print. It became a benchmark of 1950s iconoclasm and its targets were numerous.

Jim Dixon is, like Amis, a young untenured don in a provincial university, though his subject is history rather than English. He becomes the agent for a fast-moving, almost random sequence of satirical attacks. His boss, Professor Neddy Welch, is a semiarticulate buffoon with a taste for madrigal music and a commitment to the organic simplicities of medieval England. He is the archetype of head-in-the-sand academia, and his satirical function is embedded in the contrast between his own absurdist persona and the presentation of his context as something that the contemporary reader recognizes as very real. Bertrand, Neddy's son, is an artist of loud pretensions, fashionable leftish sympathies and limitless social ambitions. Like Neddy, he is absurd but not quite implausible. Jim's colleague and occasional girlfriend, Margaret Peel, is theatrically neurotic, sometimes simulating the kind of nervous breakdown favoured by intellectuals, but only when this is tactically propitious. She is a personification of the mid-fifties taste for psychoanalytic depth, European existentialiasm and very English calculation.

Lucky Jim became a bestseller partly because it pre-empted Private Eye in its rebellious swipe at middle-class posturing and self-regard, but its principal source of popularity was its hero, Jim Dixon. Evelyn Waugh's early heroes – Pennyfeather and Boot particularly – find themselves bounced from one set of absurd circumstances to another and respond with an almost complicit degree of tragi-comic stoicism. Unlike them or Wodehouse's Wooster or even Orwell 's George Bowling, Jim refuses to play the hapless victim. Jim is a successful opportunist. His ‘luck’ enables him to escape the mundane hypocrisies of provincial academia for a well-paid job in industry, and he takes with him Christine, Bertrand's stunningly attractive and unpretentious girlfriend. He is neither malicious, cunning nor corrupt, but at the same time he does not promote any particular system of morality or belief. Contemporary readers liked him not because of what he represented but because of what he did. He exposed the hypocrisies and absurdities of middle-class life while securing for himself a satisfactory position within it.